Does bigger parachute work better than smaller parachute?

Answer 1

It really depends on what you're using it for, and the experience level of the parachutist. Bigger parachutes are safer and fly slower, and are ideal for students and beginners. Experienced skydives often use very small high performance parachutes in order to fly very fast horizontally, close to the ground (known as "swooping"). However, one of the most common causes of injury and death in skydiving is inexperienced skydivers flying parachutes that are too small for them to handle.

Answer 2

You're doing heavy drops, correct? If you drop personnel one parachute (not counting the reserve--you never want to be under both at the same time!) is all you need anyway, and two parachutes could become tangled in each other. When you're dropping equipment, it's different because the parachutes are vastly bigger. The Army's most popular cargo chute is the G-11. It's 100 feet in diameter, can bring down a 5000-pound load, and weighs 250 pounds. Now let's say you needed to drop something that weighed 20,000 pounds. You could put four G-11s on it, or you could use a 200-foot parachute if you could get one. But a 200-foot parachute would need a lot more area to lay it out when you packed it, it would weigh much more so the riggers would have a harder time working with it, it would cost more than four G-11s, and you'd have the big worry of failure: if one G-11 failed the load would still land in one piece, but if the one 200-foot chute failed your cargo would make a crater so big you could sell tickets for people to look at it. So the multiple parachute setup is better.